January 2000 Archives

Wow, that was a fast weekend. No real update today, but tomorrow I
should be back with a regular update — and the notification list
should be available tomorrow too, so you’ll be able to get a mail
letting you know when I update.

Feeling overwhelmed today, and I’m not sure why. Would take
tomorrow off, and attempt to mentally regroup, but have several
meetings that I can’t get out of. Did get my manuscript back out to
the publisher today, and hopefully it will go in without trouble, so
that means there’s only the thesis between me and getting out of here.

It’s Dave “Scripting News”
Winer
in a
suit. Dave talks like this is a rare thing, but he actually looks
quite at home in the suit. Nice tie, too.

You’re going to hear about this in quite a few places, but on the
off chance this is the only ‘blog you read: DoubleClick, a company
that runs the banner ads on many, many websites, is setting themselves
up to be able to track your online movements with an accuracy and
completeness that’s never really been possible before, online or
off. If you find this at all alarming (and you should), check out
this
Dan Gillmor article for one approach towards fighting back, or
this more militant
tactic, from the Privacy Digest (scroll down a bit).

This
rant about the
poorness of user interfaces in Open Source projects is entertaining,
but nothing that hasn’t been said before. There are some efforts to
address this that I’ve noticed on the Gnome mailing lists, but nothing
I’ve seen addresses the most important aspect: the economics. All the
user testing is expensive; how do you pay for it, when you’re giving
the end product away? More significantly, people are willing to put up
with quite a lot of crap when they think they’re getting something for
free — this might be an effective way to convert people into the
“loudmouthed power-users” required to get effective but inexpensive
feedback on interfaces. (Via both
Cam and
Wes.)

(Mental note to self: The scripts that generate the
Daily Dose pages should also set up appropriate
Genpage glossary entries, so as to make crediting common link sources
trivial.)

Wow. Joe Clark calls GeneHack a
“cute, clever
URL”. Probably one of the better things that happened to me today
(you’re have to scroll down quite a bit to find the relevant
section…)

I wonder if
Evolution will be the
mailer that finally replaces Gnus for
me. It certainly sounds impressive, and would save me having to whack
up some SQL crud myself.

Does anybody know who the
APMA is? Or, more importantly,
why some password-protected URL on their site is ending up in my
referrer logs?

Is 2000 going to be remembered as the year that
Open
Source was co-opted? I certainly hope not, but I agree that we’re
going to see some nasty patent-based court battles, maybe even some
that make the DeCSS brouhaha look tame.

New box status: Mobo, CPU, disk, and RAM ordered. Got case, CD-ROM,
video card, mouse and modem today. Will be picking up floppy drive,
sound card, and Debian on Saturday. I hope all the parts get here by
Saturday, but I’m not all that hopeful. Speaking of Debian, does
anyone have any comments on
Learning
Debian GNU/Linux (the O’Reilly Debian book)? Good or bad reviews
welcomed; that’s what I’m planning to pick up on Saturday.

Speaking of CD-ROM’s, three GeneHack readers contributed basically
the same answer to Wednesday’s “why are the buttons where they are”
question. Paraphrasing all (any errors, of course, are mine): Since
the laser and the motor have to be under the disk, putting all the
circuitry there (including the parts that open the tray) saves both
material (because otherwise you’d need a breadboard above the tray
too) and vertical height on the bezel. So, a big thanks to Dan
“Apathy” Fitch, Adam Mayer, Steve
“Health ‘n
Hacks” Pribut. Bonus points to Adam for noting that the problem
can be easily solved by mounting the drive upside down.

I played around with the Mozilla
M13/alpha release tonight. It’s actually fast enough that it’s almost
usable! And since this is a pretty slow system, on a more modern
machine it should be fine for day to day use. I tweaked the GeneHack
layout a bit when I saw how it was rendering in Mozilla, so please let
me know if that causes problems on other platforms. If I can’t build
the new system this weekend, I’ll probably do some more work on this
site, trying to clean up all the little non-conforming errors that
have crept in over the last few months.

Anyway, hope all of you have a good weekend, and I’ll see you back
here on Monday.

No real update today, as I was busy with thesis (a little) and
computer component purchasing (a bit). I actually got about half a
system ordered, and I’ll pick up the other bits and pieces at a local
place this weekend. If all goes well, I should have a new system next
week! I’m quite excited about getting a new toy; hopefully The Wife
won’t become too annoyed with me during the wait for the UPS
man…

I ended up changing quite a few things from the Ars Technica list I
linked before, but overall stayed fairly close. Abit BE6-II mobo with
a Celeron400A, CPU heat sink/fan, 64 MB RAM, and a 10.2 GB disk are on
the way, for right around $440. This weekend, I’ll pick up a case,
video card, generic CD-ROM, modem, and (depending on budget) a sound
card. I won’t make the $500 I was aiming for, but hopefully will slide
in under $600, which is still not too bad.

While I was discussing the New Toy with The Wife, she asked an
interesting question. Hopefully, somebody out there can help: On
CD-ROM drives, why are the eject and play buttons always located
beneath the tray? It makes it very difficult to hit the close
button when the drive is in a tower that’s on the floor. I know, you
can just push on the tray, but it always feels like that’s forcing the
eject motor the wrong way or something. Come up with an answer
(doesn’t have to be correct, just good) and earn eternal fame on
GeneHack.

Don’t forget the blog chat fest tonight, starting at 5:30 PST and
going until we give up, on #blogirc at irc.skunkworks.cx. See you
there…

(the title update wasn’t meant to parse as an
orgazmo reference, but…)

It’s probably going to be a light night tonight, as I’ve got to
write some kind of IRC help guide for Wednesday’s #blogirc chat, and I
actually did some thesis writing today, which means no
surfing. Anyway, into the mix…

There’s a short piece about
‘protests’ of GM’d
crops over at Reason. It’s a bit one-sided (hey, look at the
source!), but the middle part about the language used to describe
actions is kind of interesting, from a soc/cult. crit. POV.

Researchers at UCSF may have found a
point
to prions, believed to be the causative agent in mad cow disease
and the related Cruzfeld-Jakob syndrome in humans. This is actually
pretty exciting; if I had a bit more time, I’d try to track down the
paper. Alas, the thesis calls…

Before I go, a couple of odd naval gazing bits. First, I was quite
surprised to see that yesterday’s update was bigger (in bytes) than
all of last week’s put together. I must remember that blogging every
day actually takes less time overall than saving it all up and
spewing. Second, and probably not amusing to anyone but me, I got
about 1.5 times as many page views on Friday, with no update, as I did
on Monday, with an update. Go figure. Okay, off to write about IRC…

Hey, remember me? I used to have a weblog here…or at least that’s
what it feels like. It’s amazing what a little time off will do to
your perspective; I feel a bit more balanced about the whole ‘blogging
versus thesis versus the 16 other things I’m doing part of my life —
we’ll see how long that lasts. And now, I think I have some links
buried around here somewhere…

Last week, perl.com had a short piece
in defense
of coding standards. (Those of you who hang in the SDM might
recognize the author.) This is something I’ve thought about a bit in
the past, because most (if not all) of the code I write at work is
going to end up being publicly available — and you don’t want to look
sloppy to potential employers or co-workers. I’m also (in my infinite
amount of spare time) trying to work on a style guide for the xemacs.org website, and some of this
stuff could apply there too. Gonna have to sit down and devote some
cycles to this…

A couple of other people pointed to this
nanobe
story, about very, very small things that may or may not be alive
(the rational scientific opinion isn’t in yet; the non-rational
scientists are calling each other names and jumping to conclusions,
per usual). If they are ‘alive’, they’re probably only ‘alive’ like
viruses are — that is to say, only when they’re infecting
something. Another, much more interesting possibility is that they’re
alive in a distributed sense, with different individual
cell-like bodies doing overlapping subsets of basic life functions to
support the growth of the whole ‘organism’ — which would give people
studying them fits, and make the rest of us sit up and pay attention.
Those of you wondering which kind of scientist I am…well,
guess. Sissies. 8^)=

The new RISKS
digest is out, featuring the true (or at least another version of
the) story of the Stinger missile-wielding kangaroos. (I’d link
directly to the item, but it appears Lindsey hasn’t HTML-ized it yet
— but I’m sure it’s there now; go look.)

For my later use: information about changing the fonts and colors
in *nix Netscape with
.Xdefaults.

Speaking of Netscape, I built a CVS snapshot of Mozilla this
weekend (after waiting 8 hours or so for it to download; I’m sure my
ISP loves me). The good news is I was able to get it to build on my
LinuxPPC box, and it runs and is fairly stable. The bad news is, even
with optimization, and without debugging info compiled in, it’s still
slower than dirt on my 166 MHz 604e. I’ll be sticking with Netscape
for now, I think.

And speaking of LinuxPPC, I see that Yellow Dog Linux (who make
another Linux distribution for the PowerPC platform) have started
their own mailing
lists. That’s really too bad; the community lists hosted at
linuxppc.org have always been about Linux on the PowerPC platform, not
just the LinuxPPC distribution — and it’s all Linux, mostly, which
means all the Linux resources on the ‘net apply too.

And speaking of Linux, after much mental deliberation, and a fair
bit of talking The Wife around, I think we’re going to be picking up
an x86 setup. I’ll run *nix on that (probably Debian, but feel free to
pitch your favorite distribution to me), and The Wife will inherit the
7500++, which will go back to running the MacOS. (Haven’t decided if
I’ll leave a LinuxPPC partition on it or not — I probably will, and
I’ll keep trying to convince her to shift over.) So, I spent quite a
bit of time this weekend checking out reviews, and buyer’s guides, all
and that rot. I’m a PC hardware newbie, and I’m about half convinced
that it’s made deliberately cryptic, just to mess with people. Anyway,
I’m looking to put together a Celeron-based system for around US$500
to US$600 (that’s just the box; I’ve got a monitor and
printer). Pointers, opinions, etc., etc., are all very welcome — I’ll
post more of a spec sheet when I have a better idea of what I’m
looking for. (Okay, it’s pretty close to Ars Technica’s
budget box,
but I’d like to bring the price down US$100 or so.)

Wow — look at all that text I had backed up. I should probably go
back, and edit a lot of that way, way down, but it’s late, and I’m
tired, and I actually have to go to work tomorrow and Get Things Done
On The Thesis. I’ll be trying to ‘blog this week, like normal, or at
the very least putting up a “no update” update. Oh — and if you need
to mail me about any of the things above, I’ll be at
jacobs@genehack.org, like
always. Have a good one, and keep yer head down — it’s Monday, after all.

Still no real blog, still no time. Mostly finished with the minor
revisions that were needed to get the paper accepted; it should be
going out tomorrow. Now I just have to get the thesis finished. I
think if I really crank, I can finish the current chapter by Saturday
or Sunday, and the next chapter early next week. Then I should be able
to get back to a more normal schedule here. The good news is that I
finally got myself into the head down, locked jaw, teeth gritted, grim
inevitability mental state where all I want to do is get the damn
thing out. Focus is good, but it’s not making life all that pleasant
for those around me…

Speaking of teeth, I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. Due to
very bad childhood experiences, I hate and fear the dentist. One
reason I’m writing this long update is because I can’t sleep,
thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow morning. Here’s
something I just don’t understand: in the last few decades, especially
the current one, we’ve made huge strides in medicine and other
sciences. Why is dentistry still using essentially the same tools and
techniques as 50 years ago? Why do I have to let at least two
strangers stick their hands and sharp metal objects into my mouth?
Most importantly, if the latter is necessary, why do I have
to be awake while it happens?

This is really starting to look more journal than blog, isn’t it?
Sorry ‘bout that. I’ve seen some interesting stuff, but only via other
‘blogs, and I’m too tired to remember what came from where right
now. So, for the rest of this week, and maybe the next, be your own
blogger: go to the appropriate start page, and
start clicking. I usually do comics, good deeds, journals, the linux
section, then general (aka blogs), followed by music blogs, and then
news. I save the science stuff for the evening, when I’ve got more
time to read carefully.

Is anybody out there interested in a notification list, a la
Medley (and others)?
Let me know.

It’s gonna be a light week around here, as I’m (finally) getting
into thesis mode, which means less surfing, and less stuff to comment
on. I’m also trying to crank on the
xemacs.org site, so that’s taking some
energy too. (Here’s a sneak peek at the new
look. Well, new look v1.1; there have been some changes since the
screen shot I put up a couple weeks ago.)

I’m about two months behind on my print periodicals, but I did
recently get through the Reader’s Choice issue of Rolling
Stone. I skipped most of the cruft (Backstreet Boys, ugh.) but
did notice that in the “Artists Pick Best-of-Year” section that Mark
Hoppus (the bassist from Blink-182) listed both Clarity by
Jimmy Eat World and Something To Write Home About by The Get
Up Kids. Nice to see a bigger name giving some back to those still on
the way up.

The latest issue of
Brave GNU
World talks about Sawmill, among other things.

Somebody actually went and implemented
Vigor! This is a
Microsoft Office-like paper clip helper doodad — for vi. Inspired by
User Friendly, and depicted
in the strip as causing scads of vi users to switch to emacs, to
escape the dreaded thing.

You are most like a BASSET HOUND. You are one laid-back individual!
You cherish your “down time” and treasure the moments that you have
no responsibility to anyone but your couch and TV set. You are easy
to get along with and are extremely low maintenance. You probably
love to hang out with your friends, as long as it is in a low-key
environment. Although some might consider you lazy, you prefer to
think of yourself as “relaxed.” Your no-frills approach to life
makes you a refreshing friend to all.

How to tell it’s gone too far: You’re seriously considering
entering the
Angband save-file
competition. Bonus points if you did seriously consider
it, but didn’t enter because you don’t play the varient used in this
round, and didn’t think you could overcome the competitive
disadvantage that gave you.

On the bag tip, reader Jaime Burns pointed me to
CourierWare,
where there are some fine looking bags, apparently aimed at the bike
messenger market. Not too shabby. Dan
“Lake Effect” Hartung
recommended the Land’s End Square Rigger Deluxe attache case. I’d look
up the link for that on the Land’s End site, but I’m too lazy (see above).
As far as the
amazon.com
bag that I had issues with, they replied prompty to an email, and
are sending a new bag (and a return mail sticker to ship the old one
back). Nice customer service; now if they’d work on that brain dead
patent thing…

The new ‘net money is starting to
invest
in biotech, and they’re bringing their economic culture with them:

Barkas, on the other hand, argued that the biotech firms featured at
the conference all had an excellent shot at triumph. “You don’t have
to have a product on the market for people to have confidence in a
company,” he said. “They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t going to
be a success.”

Researchers at Cornell have data suggesting a mouse with
built-in
wrist support may keep the hand in a more ‘neutral’ position,
which is thought to reduce the chance of RSI. What about trackballs? Seems odd to leave those out…

Well, that appears to be the bottom of the Big Bag O’ Linkage. Have
a good weekend, and I’ll catch up with you on Monday.

Well, last night’s #BlogIRC fest was great fun. So much, in fact,
that I’m skipping today’s update, because I don’t really have the time
to do it justice.

I’d post some excerpts from the chat, but (a) there were really too
many to pick one just one or two, and (b) I forgot to turn on
logging. I’m sure someone else had it on, so I’ll point to that when I
hear about it.

Probably going to be a light update; I’ve got some mail to try to catch up on.

A while back, I mentioned that I had switched to
Sawmill, a window manager
that uses a Emacs Lisp dialog for configuration and scripting, and is
overall very lightweight and fast. Those of you interested in a
high-level-language scripted WM but who are Lisp-phobic can rejoice at the
PointLess Window
Manager, which is similar to Sawmill in concept but implemented in
Python.

A couple of other bloggers pointed to Keith Devlin’s
The Death of the
Paragraph. It’s not exactly the same thing, but I’m finding, as I
work on my thesis, that my writing style has been changed by the
amount of web and email writing I do. I’m not yet sure if it’s for good or bad,
but I am having to struggle to achieve a ‘scholarly’ tone, and to
fully develop my arguments. Not that I don’t have to develop logical structures
for the web and email too, but there’s a definite difference, and
switching back and forth every day is giving me multiple cognition
syndrome — not a bad thing, but sometimes annoying.

The
Mnemonic
Project is attempting to build a web browser that will be released
under the GNU license. Here’s a
screenshot
— it looks semi-functional! Doesn’t do tables yet, which is too
bad. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to play with this soon…

This
brief
review of Robert Young’s Under the Radar (which
chronicles the rise of Red Hat) makes it sound like a moderately
interesting read, but not something I’m going to run right out and
pick up — I’ll wait for the paperback.

Looks like that’s it; I’m off to answer mail before collapsing in
bed. Don’t forget; #BlogIRC on EFNet tonight, 8:30 PM EST. Hope to see
you there.

Well, according to my copy of “‘Bloggin for Dummies”, I’m required to
comment on the Time Warner AOL deal. Brighter people than I have said
better things about the long-term implications of this for consumers,
and I’m not going to bother to link them, because everybody else
already has. All the media pundits are saying the same thing: “This
isn’t good for anybody except Time Warner shareholders”. That’s only
partly correct; I think it’s bad for the stockholders too, in the long
run. Ignoring the people who own stock indirectly (for example,
through pension, retirement, or money market funds), it seems like the
professional (or even serious amateur) stock trader is highly
dependent on information, and the best way to ensure a fast, wide
information pipe is to have a large number of sources. Sure, there are
signal:noise problems, but once you get down to one channel, it’s
either signal or noise — there’s no in between. Guess which one
you’re going to get.

(Hey, I bet Michael Wolf of New York Magazine is getting some crap at
work today — Monday’s column
predicts that in 2000, “Old media buys new media with dot-com ad
dollars.” so close!)

While we’re on the scary tip, have a look at www.anybirthday.com. That’s
right, a publicly accessible database correlating name, zip code, and
birth date. Nothing like making identity theft really easy, eh? If I
were in a paranoid mood, I might start to rant about how this is all
part of the plan to get us locked into biometric-based identification
(voice-, retina-, finger-prints), which will be even more
privacy-invading. But I’m not, so I won’t.

Although it doesn’t seem to think that I exist. Or The Wife. Hurm;
seems more likely that their servers are Not Right.

Last week I mentioned the amazon.com bag I got for Christmas, which
prompted a reader to point out the excellent bags at Waterfield Designs,
particularly this
one. The buckle is particularly striking. As far as the amazon.com
bag, the news there isn’t so good. After less than a week of usage
(and not terribly hard usage at that), the waist strap used to
restrain the bag (when cycling, for instance) basically fell off into
my hand. I mailed Amazon and asked them to send a new bag and the
postage to return the old one; I’ll let people know how that works
out. For the record, I’m assuming I just got a random poorly
manufactured bag, and that this doesn’t reflect the normal quality. If
the strap on the next one falls off, that assumption will be
a’changing.

Last week, Nerve ran this striking
photo as Photo of the Day. Warning #1 Bare breasts behind that
link; react appropriately. Warning #2 Based on URL formatting,
that picture seems likely to change after the end of January — or
maybe the end of 2000. If she has a big tattoo over her lower abdomen,
it’s the photo I pointed at.

The first weblog get-together on IRC has been planned (you knew it was
inevitable). This Wednesday (12 Jan), 8:30 PM EST (that’s 0230 UTC the
next day, right?). Get all the nitty-gritty over at Mike’s Weblog
Madness page. I’ll be there, thesis permitting, probably with the
nick ‘genehack’.

Data from the Galileo fly-by of Europa supports the sub-ice
liquid ocean model, which is consistent with the life on Europa
model. Maybe we should skip Mars, and just head straight to Europa?

Celera’s kicking big-time genome
sequencing butt. They’re 90% done, think they’ve got 97% of the
actual genes, are probably on track to finish this summer, and are
claiming that they’ll release “most” of the sequence publicly. It
would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

There’s more than a little whiff of right-wing crank (or is it
libertarian crank?) around Undernews, but the Jan 10
entry had some good bits, notably “Rigging the Debates”, “Drug Busts”,
and “The List” of questions you won’t hear at the Presidential
debates later this year. The good bits are too long to pull quote;
just follow the link. By the way, I signed a petition today to get a
medical marijuana referendum on the ballot here. For the third time
(And the first two passed. Overwhelmingly.) Ain’t democracy grand?

Ugh. I had a nice update for y’all, but the computer ate it. I’ll try
to remember what I had, and toss it into a super-duper extra-bonus
chunk-o-rific update tomorrow. Oh, and if you’re waiting for email
from me, I’m on it — just running a bit behind at the moment.

Screenshot
of Apple’s new MacOS X desktop. Looks pretty, but how well does it
work?

Molly Ivins is coming out in favor of
Bradley
in today’s column. Being a Kansas boy myself, I have to dig this:

What he does have, and it takes a while to explain this, is
Midwesterness. Not to paint with a broad brush or anything, but
Midwesterners tend to be incredibly practical and incurably
down-to-earth. (I base this opinion on the three years, including 18
winters, that I spent in Minnesota.)

I can’t explain it either, but I completely understand what she’s
talking about.

A popular link today (again, first spotted at /.):
Larry Wall
on the development of Perl. Larry Wall is an excellent writer;
even if you have no idea what Perl is, I imagine you’d still enjoy
this one.

A question for the hardware heads in the audience: I just purchased
one of
these
on eBay — it’s a half-height 1.2 gig drive, with 80 pin Ultra3
SCSI connection. Stupid git that I am, I didn’t read closely enough to see the
‘80 pin’ part before placing my bid — all I’ve got internally is 50
pin SCSI-I. I already picked up an appropriate drive to fill that
slot, so I don’t really even had a good spot to stick it. How
expensive/troublesome is it going to be to pick up a case for it and
then slap a SCSI-I adaptor on the case and hang it off my external chain?

In the latest instance of genetic testing testing history,
scientists are attempting to discover if
Louis
XVII really died in prison, or if loyalists broke him out so that
he could father descendents.

RNA interference
works in
mammals! This is huge — RNA interference is a technique
that lets scientists turn off specific genes — something that’s been
(up to this point) very very difficult to do in mammals. Turning off a
gene and then seeing what happens is a standard experiment in
genetics; it’s especially useful when you don’t really know what the
gene might be doing. Hopefully by the time the experimental animal
genomes start coming on-line, this technique will be debugged so the
genome centers can swing right into systematic knock-outs…

I’m not sure why, but something about
this page screams
‘Disgruntled crank!’.

This has been linked all over too (I think I saw it on
/. first). It’s a screed about how tech support cartoons (e.g.,
User Friendly) aren’t funny:
ID10T errors in
cartooning. The subtitle is “Why must we mock those who don’t
understand?” — the answer is “Because mocking those who do
understand isn’t as funny.”

Everybody’s putting on a fresh face to start the new year —
saturn.org is sporting a new skin, one
that doesn’t make Netscape start swapping when it renders! (Don’t get
me wrong, I liked the old design, it just made my browser
unhappy.)

(And yes, yesterday’s wine link was put up with a certain
Medley in mind — what can
I say, you name your domain ‘uncorked’, and you start to get a
reputation for liking the grape juice… 8^)

The aggressive counter-action to commodity totalitarianism is to
give things away. Not other people´s property — that would be, sad
to say, “piracy” — but the products of your own imagination, your
own creative effort.

I expect to see this one linked from a bunch of places today.

At last, an explanation of the Three Virtues of
a programmer. (Laziness, impatience, and hubris, for those non-geeks
out there.) Via the Whump! (hey,
I’ve got that hat!)

Cool, the Sandbenders Collective is
getting
started. Although I thought they were supposed to be in Oregon…

In the “boy, they just don’t learn” category, the Feds reprise the
stunningly successful Steve Jackson Games raid by
taking on
Ramsey Electronics, a supplier of educational electronic
kits. More at
technocrat.net.

Dan “Apathy” Fitch pulls out
all stops with his lo-fi simANSI-phreaker-b04rdz site remake. I’m
speechless, kids, and those that know me will tell ya it takes a lot
to get me to that unfamiliar spot. Go Dan!

Bit of a lame update. I bookmarked several promising things, but
after fully reading them, didn’t have anything interesting to say
about them. Also suffering from the inevitable post-holiday
back-to-work blues. See you tomorrow…